Camelot Lingers But Who Remembers?

The morning it came home to him, my friend was on a daily bicycle ride to nowhere. On the exercycle, earphones in place, he was twirling the dial, trying to find decent traveling music.

At precisely 7:45 a.m., just when the digital readout hit his aerobic rate, he had located it: A great station. The hits kept coming and my friend kept cycling. Suddenly a woman with a youthful voice interrupted his high to make this announcement: ``Good morning. You`re listening to Oldies 103.``

Oldies? Had his discovery been the oldies station? The very notion was enough to give him a coronary if, of course, he wasn`t in such great shape for his age. Oldies were Frank Sinatra, not the Rolling Stones. Oldies were his parents, not him.

My friend (I will call him Bruce Babyboomer) was a member of the birthing class of 1946, and husband of Betty, circa 1948. He was not unaware of middle age. Indeed Bruce had received the exercycle for his 40th. But he never had felt quite so pushed into the next generation until now. Oldies.

His mind began to race through other evidence that he had come of age. There was a man of exactly his years who was being considered for the U.S. Supreme Court. There was a man younger than he running for President of the United States. Just recently, his wife had pointed out how young the women in the Oil of Olay ads were these days.

Then on television last night, he had seen another of those ads for Dow Chemical, the ones in which young people tell how grand it is to work for a socially responsible employer. The very same employer that had been famous in Bruce`s 20s for making napalm.

If that were not bad enough, the Vietnam War, his war, had been resurrected and reduced to a weekly program. To college students it was, he imagined, like a World War II show. Oldies.

The jokes making the rounds among his friends since the stock crash all carried that edge. They were jokes about 22-year-old arbitragers who had it coming. Jokes about know-it-all 25-year-old brokers.

A friend of Bruce and Betty`s had spent the weekend with teenage nephews and returned aghast. These teenagers didn`t know of Gene McCarthy, Woodstock, or the Ho Chi Minh trail.

``They aren`t getting the same education we had,`` complained the uncle who was born in 1951. Culturally illiterate, the trio of Babyboomers all agreed. But now my friend wondered whether the boys were culturally illiterate or just young.

Bruce began to mentally list some of the changes that were occurring as his postwar cohorts came into midlife. In the schools where they teach, the movement is toward ``structure`` for the young, and back to ``basics`` for their education. In the courts where they practice, the pendulum has swung from expanding students` rights to supporting authority.

The colleges they liberated once again are being pressured to act as parents. Legislatures now routinely vote higher drinking ages with their blessings. Everywhere among his peers, there is aging, and with it a bit of youth-bashing, a touch of youth-squashing.

Is this just a midcourse correction for a society that had adulated youth, he wondered? Or are the new ``oldies`` tightening the reins?

My friend is at the early edge of this massive population that has moved through society flexing numerical muscles, demanding attention by its sheer size. Youth ruled when he was young. Middle age rules now that he is middle-aged. Is that a coincidence?

There came a generation that knew not Spiro Agnew, Walter Cronkite, parietal hours-that only knows ``Jumpin` Jack Flash`` as an Oldie.

It is odd enough for any member of a massive youth generation to ride over the line, even on a stationary cycle, into the world of Oldies. But who would have thought that once they got there, postwar babies would reopen the generation gap from the other side?